Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Happy Book Birthday to My Big Fat Zombie Goldfish: The SeaQuel!

Wasn't that an interesting interview? I'm looking forward to sharing it with my students later today.

Tom
and Frankie are like a modern day
Lassie and that kid that Lassie hung out with. (I’m not very good with names.)

Tom
and Pradeep are best friends and they just also happen to have an undead zombie
goldfish as a pet/ bodyguard. (Seems
pretty normal to me.) Anyway, My Big Fat
Zombie Goldfish is a book about
friendship and, whether that’s between two kids or between a kid and his pet,
being there for your friend is always important.

His
internal illustrations make me laugh every time I open one of the books. All I have to say is look for the pigeon in
book one. He’s in there twice. Every time I see his expression I crack up.

When
I was a kid my brother and I actually did resuscitate our pet goldfish. ( I
would like to say for the record that my brother is neither a scientist , nor
evil.) We found him (the goldfish that is, not my brother) floating belly up in
his bowl when we got home from school one day and knew we had to help. Obviously we had seen way too many hospital
TV shows because we decided that shocking him back to life with a 9vt battery
was the way to go. (Please don’t try this at home) Anyway, it worked, and he
had a very happy life after that swimming around in his bowl in my brother’s
room. (If our fish turn into a zombie though he was a very polite one and never
tried hypnotizing anyone… unless…. Hey maybe that’s why I don’t remember him
being a zombie…. Hmmm? )

Funny
books are necessary in life. To me they are as important to my survival as
oxygen, water and brownies.I have a quote from ‘Matilda’ that I keep
above my desk which reads, “Do
you think that all children’s books ought to have funny bits in them,” Miss
Honey asked.

“I
do,” Matilda said, “Children are not so serious as grownups and they love to
laugh.”

The
“What If?”-ing Your Way Into a Story” workshop isa fun way to
spend an hour with kids exercising their creative brains and coming up with the
most bizarre things on the planet. (Seriously, you would not believe the
characters that have been invented in these things.)

It’s based on writing, acting and impro exercises that I’ve used over the years
for idea generating. It seems to really
click with kids as a way of turning off the sensor in the brain so that you can
unlock new ideas.

Reading
is fun, informative, painful, engaging, hilarious, magical, scary,
enthralling, occasionally dull, mind expanding, giggle making, heart rending
and sometimes challenging. It can be fat or skinny, tall or short, light or
dark, (sounds like I’m talking coffee here, but please go with it) bad or good,
up or down, big or small. It’s shared
and it’s secret, it’s read aloud in class or squinted at with a flashlight
under the covers, it’s the thing you have to tell someone or you’ll burst and
the thing that you know is burned in your heart but you’ll never tell a soul. That is the power of reading. It has the
potential to be anything and everything.

Having
said that, life is not reading so go out and run around and climb trees a bit
too.

Mr.
Schu, you should have asked me about my pet iguana. Actually,
I don’t have a pet iguana, but wish I did. That would be cool. I
do have pet kittens, which inspired me to write a kitten character into book 3
of My Big Fat Zombie Goldfish.

Thank
you so much for your sentences Mr Schu.
It was a pleasure finishing them for you.

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About Mr. Schu

I am a part-time lecturer at Rutgers University and the Ambassador of School Libraries for Scholastic. I work diligently to put the right book in every child's hand. Book trailers are one way to connect readers with books. (All opinions shared are on own.)